Field of the Invention
The invention relates both to a device and a vehicle having a device for detecting a collision of an object on a collision location detection region of a vehicle, comprising a first and a second essentially enclosed hollow body which are connected to part of the vehicle bodywork, which are disposed with their longitudinal axis parallel to a collision location detection direction and overlapping one another in the collision location detection region, and which are disposed close to the outer surface of the vehicle in such a way that at least one of the hollow bodies is compressed during the collision. The device additionally has a first and a second sensor for detecting the compression of the associated first and second hollow body respectively, a signal indicative of the relevant compression being able to be tapped off at each sensor, and also an evaluator to which the two signals can be fed. The invention additionally relates to a corresponding method in which such a vehicle or at least one such device is used.
A device, vehicle and method of this kind are known from publication WO 09/82639 A1 which discloses a device (pg, 17, lines 4 to 13 and FIG. 6) which has overlapping hollow bodies along part of the vehicle's outer paneling which serves as a bumper. In said hollow bodies there are mounted pressure sensors which can detect an impacting object, e.g. a pedestrian, by means of the pressure increase resulting from compression of the respective hollow body and can communicate it to a processing unit (evaluator) in the form of a signal. The corresponding collision location can be determined depending on which pressure sensor transmits more or less signal to the evaluator. A pedestrian protection device, for example, is designed to be triggered depending on the collision determined and possibly also depending on the collision location determined, i.e. the rear part of the motor vehicle's engine hood can be raised so that the distance between the engine hood and the underlying engine is increased, thereby softening the impact of the pedestrian's head on the engine hood.
Such a sensing device can of course also give an early indication of an incipient severe collision and its collision location to the processing unit of an occupant protection system which then, for example, influences the triggering threshold of a vehicle collision measuring accelerometer in such a way that an occupant protection device such as an airbag or similar is deployed earlier.
For the disclosed device, the higher the accuracy required for determining the collision location, the more hollow bodies each with their own pressure sensor must be disposed in the bumper. However, this involves very high constructional cost/complexity and extensive wiring of each pressure sensor to the processing unit. Moreover, very high cost/complexity is necessary for transmitting data to the evaluator and for computing the larger number of individual signals from the pressure sensors in the evaluator.